Why Is Anthem Crashing Some PS4s?

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Anthem has many problems, but some might be more serious than we initially thought. Beyond the wonky pacing and server hiccups, BioWare’s latest game might be contributing to some small number of PS4s becoming inoperable.

Last week, we mentioned that we’ve run into various issues on the PS4 Pro. Over and over, we’ve seen simple game crashes that cause the console to jump back to the system menu. But if that was the full extent of the technical shortcomings, we wouldn’t be that worried about it. It’s frustrating, but Anthem is far from the first game with those kinds of stability problems.

Much more worrisome was the full system crash that required a reboot and system diagnostics. So far, we’ve only seen it happen once, but it seems that we weren’t the only ones. Over at Kotaku, Ethan Gach has rounded up a selection of worrisome reports of Anthem’s instability on the PS4.

Not only does he point toward a particularly worrisome Reddit post claiming that a PS4 has been bricked after playing Anthem, but Gach says that Kotaku has also received a different report of the same failure to boot up. Scary, right?

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While these reports are concerning, it’s important not to jump to conclusions before we understand the problem. Gach points out that Anthem has made the fans in his launch-era PS4 work overtime, so he posits that overheating may be the culprit. Sure, a buildup of heat could be causing these issues, but the reality might be more complicated.

BioWare and EA undoubtedly deserve blame for shipping such a technically problematic release on PS4, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the most severe failures resulted from a perfect storm of a particularly resource-intensive game, overall software stability problems, and the hardware quirks with a small number of consoles.

Consider an issue we ran into with Resident Evil VII two years ago: It seems that there was some sort of peculiarity with a small number of PS4 Pros that caused horrible graphical corruption to appear under very select conditions. Sony eventually ended up taking responsibility for the issue and replaced the malfunctioning hardware. As such, contacting PlayStation support is probably your best path forward if your console becomes inoperable.

If you’re biting your nails over a handful of reports of these catastrophic issues, maybe it’s best to hold off until the game has received a few more patches. And at the very least, consider dusting off the vents.